Friday

Panel Session 1
9:00 - 10:30 AM - Friday, February 17

Location: Homeroom

Bodies, Gender and South Asia in Transnational Context
Chairs: Lalaie Ameeriar and Falu Bakrania

“The Troubling Subject of 'Wayward Asian Girls': Gendered Nationalism, Race and Class in the South Asian Diaspora”
Falu Bakrania, Ethnic Studies Program, San Francisco State University

“Space, Power, Gender: Transnational Health Practices in Tibet”
Jennifer Marie Chertow, Department of Cultural and Social Anthropology, Stanford University

“'It Hasn't Affected Me, It Happened Around Me': Constructing September 11 as an American Thing”
Lalaie Ameeriar, Department of Cultural and Social Anthropology, Stanford University

“A Transnational Feminist Account of U.S. South Asian Identity Formation”
Shireen Roshanravan, Philosophy, Interpretation & Culture Program, Binghamton University

Discussant: Lubna Nazir Chaudhry, State University of New York, Binghamton

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Location: Ida & Robert Sproul Room

Socialities of Virtue: Religion and the Politics of Affiliation
Chair: Neena Mahadev

“Development's Devotees: Religious Idioms of Modern Self-Making in Tamil Nadu”
Anand Pandian, Institute of Asian Research, University of British Columbia

“Sin and Social Mobility: Conversion and Conflicting Cosmologies in Buddhism/Hinduism and Christianity in Sri Lanka”
Neena Mahadev, Department of Anthropology, Johns Hopkins University

“Religion, Nationalism, and Student Politics at Osmania University, Hyderabad”
Kavita Datla, Department of History, University of California, Berkeley

Discussant: Chris Chekuri, Department of History, San Francisco State University

Panel Session 2
10:45 AM - 12:15 PM - Friday, February 17

Location: Homeroom

Minding the Minor: Minorities and the Nation
Chair: Emily Rook-Koepsel

“On Responsibility and Unbecoming: Reading the Radical Politic in Mahasweta Devi's Shishu”
Julietta Singh, Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature, University of Minnesota

“Minority, Parity and Equality: Debating Democracy in the 1946 Cabinet Mission Debates”
Emily Rook-Koepsel, Department of History, University of Minnesota

“Finding Anti-Utopia in the Representations of Utopian Delhi ”
Aditi Chandra, Department of Art History, University of Minnesota

“Reading Feminist Politics in India's Northeast”
Papori Bora, Department of Women's Studies, University of Minnesota

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Location: Ida & Robert Sproul Room

Fissures in the Imperial Narrative: Production and Consumption of Historical Memory in Colonial India
Chair: Prachi Deshpande

“An Imperial Moment: Seth Noamul Hotchand and the Annexation of Sindh”
Manan Ahmed, University of Chicago

“A Foundational Romance: Bhagmati and Qutb in Modern Hyderabad”
Eric Beverley, Harvard University

“Textual Travels: Genre, Historiography and the Archive in a Marathi Memoir of 1857”
Prachi Deshpande, Rutgers University-Newark

“Of Master and Munshi: Notes on Francis Gladwin's Persian Moonshee ”
Rajeev Kinra, University of Chicago

Session 3
1:30 - 3:00 PM - Friday, February 17

Location: Homeroom

Screening: Continuous Journey
Directed by Ali Kazimi
In 1914, Gurdit Singh, a Sikh entrepreneur based in Singapore, chartered a Japanese ship, the Komagata Maru, to carry Indian immigrants to Canada. On May 23, 1914, the ship arrived in Vancouver Harbour with 376 passengers aboard. Only a half-mile from Canadian shores, it was surrounded by immigration boats and the passengers were held virtual prisoners on the ship. Thus began a dramatic stand-off which would escalate over the course of two months, becoming one of the most infamous incidents in Canadian history. Continuous Journey is an inquiry into this history of Canada's exclusion of the South Asians by the immigration policy called the Continuous Journey Regulation of 1908.

Cosponsored by 3rd I

Location: Ida & Robert Sproul Room

Screening: The Kumars at No 42
This BBC comedy features the Kumars, an Indian family living north of London who have bulldozed their garden and replaced it with a TV studio. The son, Sanjeev, hosts a talk show there, suffering the interruptions of his family members, who meddle and insult him in Punjabi from their nearby perch. As hard as he tries to interview his guests, who include Helena Bonham-Carter, Minnie Driver and Ismail Merchant, Sanjeev's parents and grandmother end up stealing the show.

 

Panel Session 4
3:15 - 4:45 PM - Friday, February 17

Location: Homeroom

The Suffering of a Noble King: Literary, Dramatic, and Cinematic Adaptations of the Harishcandra Legend
Chair: Adheesh Sathaye

“Hara is Truth, Truth is Hara: Hariscandra in Kannada Cultural Imagination”
Prithvi Datta Chandra Shobhi, Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago

“Projections of Raja Harishchandra: A New Indian Hero or an Old Image?”
Bulbul Tiwari, Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago

“A Theater of Horror: Aesthetics, Caste, and Harishcandra in Sanskrit Drama”
Adheesh Sathaye, Department of Asian Studies, University of British Columbia

Discussant: Vasudha Dalmia, University of California, Berkeley

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Location: Ida & Robert Sproul Room

No event scheduled

5:00 PM - Friday, February 17

Location: Great Hall

Reception

6:30 PM - Friday, February 17

Location: Auditorium

Keynote Lecture by Vikram Chandra

Keynote speaker Vikram Chandra will read from his new novel Sacred Games, after which Gautam Premnath of the UC Berkeley Department of English will lead a discussion with the author. Read more.

Saturday

Panel Session 1
9:00 - 10:30 AM - Saturday, February 18

Location: Homeroom

Shaping Postcolonial Democracy: Urban Utopias, Conservation Paradigms and Social Movements in Modern India
Chair: Phelps Feeley

“From Utopia to Reality: Post-Independence Urban Challenges in South Asia”
Ashish Nangia, University of Washington, Seattle

“Of Reports, Bills and a 'Model': Contemporary Debates in Wildlife Conservation in India”
Tapoja Chaudhuri, Environmental Anthropology, University of Washington, Seattle

“Allowing Space for Liberated Zones: Governance Functions of Naxalite Land-Grabs in Bihar”
Phelps Feeley, University of Washington, Seattle

Discussant: Tapoja Chaudhuri, University of Washington, Seattle

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Location: Ida & Robert Sproul Room

The Designated and the Displaced: Women in Colonial Bengal
Chair: Manjira Dutta

“Bengali Women in Teaching and Medicine: the Early Decades”
Manjira Dutta, Department of History, University of Calcutta

“'The Day has Passed, Dusk has Set / Take Me to the Other Side': Banerjees' Women: Indir Thakrun, Naini and Burhi”
Ruprekha Choudhury, Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley

“Deconstructing the Bhadramahila in Bengali and South Asian American Fiction”
Kasturi Ray, Department of English, University of California, Berkeley

Discussant: Abhijeet Paul, University of California, Berkeley

Panel Session 2
10:45 AM - 12:15 PM - Saturday, February 18

Location: Homeroom

Re-Imaging Lucknow: Disjunctures in the Style, Sexuality, and History of Awadh
Chair: Saleema Waraich

“Imaginary Trespasses: Gender, Space, and Representation in Awadh, North India”
Hussein Keshani, IHUM, Stanford University

“Two Faces of Lucknow: Divergent Views of an 'Indo-Islamic' City ”
Saleema Waraich, Department of Art History, University of California, Los Angeles

“Memorializing Lucknow: Abdul Halim Sharar and the Desire for History”
C. Ryan Perkins, Department of South Asia Studies, University of Pennsylvania

Discussant: Hussein Keshani, IHUM, Stanford University

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Location: Ida & Robert Sproul Room

Defiance and Disillusion: Narrative Strategies in Contemporary Dalit Literature
Chair: Toral Gajarawala

“Laboring Bodies, the List and Elisions”
Toral Gajarawala, Department of Literature, University of Oregon

“The Psychological Dalit Narrative: Negotiating Identity for Educated, Urban Dalit Elites”
Laura R. Brueck, Department of Asian Studies, University of Texas at Austin

“Defilement and Liberation in Dalit Autobiography”
Shalini Ramachandran, Department of English and Comparative Literature, San Diego State University

Panel Session 3
1:30 - 3:00 PM - Saturday, February 18

Location: Homeroom

Telling Tales: Comparative Anthropologies of Youth in South Asia
Chair: Craig Jeffrey

“Saka: A Young Woman's Life in the High Himalayas”
Jane Dyson, Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington

“'In This Modern Samay (Time)...': Postcolonial Dalit Male Teenage Life in Village North India”
Manuela Ciotti, University of Edinburgh

“Sweet Talk, Bitter Struggles: The Practices of a Student Politician in North India”
Craig Jeffrey, Department of Geography and International Studies, University of Washington

Discussant: K. Sivaramakrishnan, University of Washington

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Location: Ida & Robert Sproul Room

Rethinking the Nexus of Diaspora and Nation
Chair: Gautam Premnath

A Roundtable With:

Falu Bakrania, Department of Ethnic Studies, San Francisco State University
Rosemary George, Department of Literature, University of California, San Diego
Gayatri Gopinath, Women and Gender Studies, University of California, Davis
Gautam Premnath, Department of English, University of California, Berkeley

Panel Session 4
3:15 - 4:45 PM - Saturday, February 18

Location: Homeroom

Islamist Fantasies, Imperial Desires: The Piety of Thinking and Action

Chair: Najeeb Jan

A Roundtable With:

Najeeb Jan, Department of History, University of Michigan
Nauman Naqvi, Department of Anthropology, Columbia University
Gil Anidjar, Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures, Columbia University
Katherine P. Ewing, Cultural Anthropology, Duke
David Gilmartin, History, North Carolina State University

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Location: Ida & Robert Sproul Room

No event scheduled